I am happy to encounter your healthy skepticism and provocative queries about the claims of social media evangelists and technology gurus. Since I am in the Bay Area, we are so close to all the “noise” coming out of Silicon Valley and the new SF techno-boomlet…and it takes effort to keep informed yet still detached from the hype.
This course offers us a unique vantage point from which take a brief pause from the fray and look at it critically. You will notice that our readings’ toggle back and forth weekly between Digital Culture and Spreadable Media. I scheduled the readings this way so that you can begin to consider new network connections between what Gere is discussing historically and thematically, and what Jenkins (and co-authors) are studying and theorizing contemporaneously in their approach to “Spreadable Media” across media sectors and silos.
For those of you who have e-editions, the Digital Culture reading assignment includes the Introduction through Chapter 2.
For Spreadable Media, you will read from the intro “How to Read this Book,” through Chapter 1.
Week 2 Resources
ENGAGE MEDIA: The Gado Gado Tactics of New Social Media in Indonesia
by Patrica Zimmermann, Ithaca College
Please read this essay (final draft to be published) to amplify your understanding of the work we are examining this week. Professor Zimmermann has been studying, writing about and speaking on Engage Media and Witness for the last several years. The piece can give you a strong foothold into how to journey into this online world being created in the Asia Pacific – and how extraordinarily different it is from our own western “user-friendly” comfort zone of web experiences.
(It is also a great example for an analytical/scholarly paper that both argues a series of points and sheds light on new terrain)
Three curatorial models for the term project
There are zillions of possible models. Take a look at these three to, perhaps, get your creative juices flowing. Or whichever other ones you would like to consider as curatorial/creative design models.
The Triangle Fire Open Archive
http://rememberthetrianglefire.org/open-archive/
Project creators: The Buscada Group, New York
This is a “preview” from Week 6. This is a simple deign to include historical and archival found materials in an easy-to access format.
Brainpickings
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/10/01/how-to-make-your-own-luck/
A weekly digest of interesting-ness by Maria Popova. She tells stories with the content she chooses, and also creates a world where the reader/viewer can pick and choose new and old items for “reappraisal and recirculation of the residual.” (Jenkins, 96)
Spreadable Media “Expanded Book”
http://spreadablemedia.org/essays/
Other essays in dialogue with the book. (Is this just clever marketing for the book?).
Public Engagement/Data Collection Tool
Sparkwise
http://sparkwi.se/
Tutorial (#2 video) on how to use Sparkwise:
http://www.thefledglingfund.org/videos
Scroll down to the second screen for the “How-To.” (In the first video the founder of Sparkwise talks about how to use it strategically. The third concerns how to staff a film’s engagement campaign from the start of the project itself.)
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